As the use of autonomous vehicles such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), optionally piloted vehicles (OPVs), and robotic land and sea vehicles becomes prevalent, improved methods for coordinating their paths to allow them to cooperate in the performance of their specified tasks will be needed. Current methods for deconfliction and coordination of multiple vehicles require each vehicle to transmit its current position and velocity to the other vehicles in its area. Using this information, each vehicle can perform some limited functions for avoiding collision and coordinating their paths but cannot find optimal paths for achieving their goals via mutual cooperation.
Proxy Aviation Systems has been developing a control system, the Universal Distributed Management System (UDMS), which permits a single user to command, control, and monitor multiple autonomous vehicles (UAVs, OPVs, robotically controlled land and sea vehicles, etc.). In this system, each vehicle can communicate with each other and with control stations and each vehicle performs its assigned mission with a high degree of autonomy. In order to demonstrate this system, Proxy Aviation developed several scenarios where multiple UAVs must fly cooperatively to accomplish their missions. When multiple aircraft are flying close to each other, a collision is possible, so Proxy developed software that runs on each aircraft that detects whether a too close encounter is imminent and if so puts the aircraft into an avoidance maneuver until the danger of a collision had passed. This software prevented collisions but often also prevented each aircraft from executing its mission efficiently.